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One year of keeping a tada list
- LightBug1 9mo agoI kind of use my calendar to do this ... if I'm frazzled at the end of the week, it helps to see what I actually did as frazzle brain will have forgotten
- amelius 9mo ago[flagged]
- bowsamic 9mo agoWhy is that impressive?
- tayo42 9mo agoAi can't do anything like a good water color painting. Also they're physical, like any painting, they look different in real life
- jebarker 9mo agoHow does the existence of AI make watercolor painting less of a challenge for a human?
- seba_dos1 9mo agoIt obviously doesn't, as otherwise the existence of other humans that are more skilled than you would have the same effect.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 9mo agoWould you call multiplying two 100-decimal numbers a challenge? I wouldn't because I would just use libgmp or sympy. And I would certainly not write about it on my "tada list" (if I had one). Anyway, that's how you should read that comment.
- jebarker 9mo agoMultiplying two 100 digit numbers requires the application of a fixed algorithm which can be learned. If you don't know the algorithm it's challenging, if you do it's not. But that is not true of painting. Painting requires choosing a subject (for its subjective qualities) and then translating what you _want_ to capture about that subject and how you want to represent it in paint on some medium. You will also be applying a theory of mind and perception about the audience of the painting since you probably want it to appeal to them. All of these choices and the skill to combine them into a painting that achieves what you want is vastly more challenging than multiplication. Multiplication is akin to paint by numbers. EDIT: it actually strikes me that this conversation gets to the crux of why AI art is so polarizing. It depends whether you view art predominantly as being about the thing that is created or the process of creation.
- fastasucan 9mo ago>Would you call multiplying two 100-decimal numbers a challenge? How is this analogous to painting?
- amelius 9mo agoAI made it so.
- GabriDaFirenze 9mo agoI think I see where you're coming from but, from personal experience, AI has not much to do with one's interest in learning how to paint or draw. I've picked up drawing again this year not only as a passion but it's something I can create with my own hands. It doesn't matter that AI can do it and can do it much better, it's that I can do it. For fun, for relaxing, for meditating, ...
- amelius 9mo ago> For fun, for relaxing, for meditating, ... Sure, but we're talking about a "tada list" here. Would you write about relaxing and meditation on __your__ tada list?
- s900mhz 9mo agoWhy not? If one of your goals is to try to relax and/or meditate more, then I feel it’s a valid list entry. It’s all a matter of perspective and personal goals, no?
- amelius 9mo agoBecause if you read the conclusion, they say that having this list gives them more pressure.
- nicbou 9mo agoYou have missed a good opportunity to be curious, rather than judgmental. Mind the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Sometimes, it takes some effort to get to the rewarding part of an activity. A little pressure is not bad when it's helping you reach your goals. Millions of people force themselves to go to the gym. People enjoy making things with their hands. They love conveying their emotions and adding their flair. If the masters did not deter people from picking up a paintbrush, why would AI slop?
- GabriDaFirenze 9mo ago
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- plagiarist 9mo agoCould humanity keep some things for personal enjoyment and enrichment? As a treat?
- AuthAuth 9mo agoRagebaiting tsk tsk You know that the watercolor painting is a gift to his friends and if made with AI it would be undermined to the worthlessness.
- chairmansteve 9mo agoLike walking or cycling instead of driving? We should get rid of the 100m sprint in the olympics because a car can do it faster? And anyway, a water color in the original cannot be mistaken for a printed ai picture.
- rw_panic0_0 9mo agothat's a nice practice that I do from time to time. Like when my inner self critic starts being too critical ("I'm not doing enough" kind of stuff), or doing things gets harder for some reason, I incorporate the routine of writing done things at the end of the day, and when the situation normalizes I stop doing it. It's usually like a month or two
- andai 9mo agoIt kind of sounds like there is a part of you that is abusive and you are rewarding it with this practice, giving it what it wants. I would personally lean in the opposite direction!
- ashtonshears 9mo agoShamefully bad advice. Journaling is common to aid the desribed issue.
- andai 9mo agoWhat I mean is, you're reinforcing a mechanism of conditional self-approval. A Sisyphean endeavor by definition! Giving yourself credit for what you've done is fine, but if it comes from a feeling of insufficiency, then at best it's symptom relief that helps you avoid the underlying issue.
- sublinear 9mo agoI do agree that it's "bad" to need a reason to justify your existence and happiness, but that's totally separate from evaluating your performance at work. I think you're assuming too much.
- andai 9mo agoI assume our entire economy runs on this basic insufficiency. You can actually see it most clearly in the most "successful" among us.
- andai 9mo ago> Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day. Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month! At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.
- sublinear 9mo agoI think weekly or bi-weekly is best since you're aligning yourself with the time scale that most workplaces tend to operate on. I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see the value of their contributions this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan. I know devs can be focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.
- ardeaver 9mo agoI can also imagine that you might need to change your definition of what an accomplishment is. I tend to think of it as something that has a measurable output, but difficult-to-measure progress towards an outcome is also something (despite what product managers might think)
- ferngodfather 9mo ago> change your definition of what an accomplishment + Get out of bed before sundown
- metabagel 9mo ago+ Spend a day above ground
- IshKebab 9mo ago> have a box per week Sounds like the weekly report most of my bosses have demanded.
- petesergeant 9mo agoI managed to do this for most of the first half of the year, and it was very rewarding indeed. Somehow it sort of dropped off, and something was lost, so I think definitely something to pick up again this coming year.
- neonnoodle 9mo agoLovely paintings!
- jeffrallen 9mo agoI have a spreadsheet where I keep track of excellent work that others do, things that surprised and delighted me, or difficult situations they handled with professionalism. Makes me smile just thinking of it. It will be useful during an upcoming review.
- victrflow 9mo agoLove this, I’ll definitely give it a try for a while. I did something similar a while back but on a monthly basis
- linsomniac 9mo agoI've been doing a work-oriented "what I did today" list for ~25 years, and really like it. Originally it started because I needed to bill for my time, but when I went to my current job (over a decade ago) I kept doing it. In my iteration, it is a concise sentence about each thing I've worked on that day. At the end of the month I go back through and review it and write up a "Wins" list. It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then. I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.
- dangoodmanUT 9mo agoI’m praying you have backups. That last paragraph gives me anxiety
- linsomniac 9mo agoWell, I haven't lost them in over a decade... So I have a pretty good track record. The system it's hosted on has had at least one, maybe two hardware failures over that time. A system isn't done being set up until it has backups up and running.
- dotancohen 9mo ago...and tested. I only had to see one machine "that was being backed up" unable to restore from backup. Wasn't mine, but was enough to teach me to test them.
- linsomniac 9mo agoAbsolutely! You're preaching to the choir here. However, that said, over ~3 decades I've found that having a successful rsync exit code and alerting when that is not true, along with periodic "full" rsync checksum runs, is effectively a failsafe way of ensuing a good backup. For our less critical systems, this plus "spot checking" by regularly going in and looking at "what did this file look like a few weeks ago" (something we commonly use backups for), has proven pretty effective while also being low work. For critical systems, definitely do test recoveries. Our database server, for example, every week recovers the production database into our staging and dev environments, so backup problems tend to get noticed pretty quickly.
- myself248 9mo agoInitially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway. Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting. And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
- QuercusMax 9mo agoFor similar psychological reasons I started keeping detailed notes of everything I did at work, at a time when it felt like I wasn't making any progress anywhere. Just seeing a record of when I helped someone else fix a bug, or all the times I moved the ball just by an inch or so - it really makes a difference. If I have 50 pages of things I spent time on, I must actually be doing something!
- jll29 9mo agoNot just for psychological reasons! As a scientist, it's best practice to keep a daily notebook called a "lab diary" where you document your work, e.g. details of experiments conducted, day by day. It is sometimes important to prove when you had a particular idea (e.g. for patenting purposes or copyright lawsuits or documenting the history of a field), and it is important to keep track of the details of experiments in order to be able to reproduce them. For that latter aspect, I recommend self-documenting data nowadays, i.e. data that comes with meta-data to explain how it was derived, such as parameters used to create data in an experiment, which I often encode in POSIX filenames (e.g. <method>-n=<n>-iter=<iter>-k=<k>.eval => "randombaseline-n=20-iter=500-k=3.eval"). Of course you can maintain such a diary in the form of a plain text file, and I often do that as additional companion, but files are editable, you may lose them, and they have not much worth in terms of serving as a proof; a paper diary with daily entries, in contrast, is telling a story that is less likely to be fake. It also makes you accountable (in case management asks you what you did on March 3 last year, you'd open your lab diary and could say "that was when we had the meeting where we decided to cancel the XYZ project"), and you can use it to extract achievements for your annual or quarterly performance reviews from it.
- andsoitis 9mo ago> tada list Ah I thought (and hoped) it was gonna be a list of epiphanies, interesting learnings, new sweetness. You know… taDA!
- medstrom 9mo agoYou mean... an aha list?
- commandersaki 9mo agoI have had many accomplishments, and I've forgotten them all. When it comes to interviewing, I've forgotten most things or can't do easy recall that I can't even speak to them. I have no desire to change though; as long as I made those accomplishments is all that matters, it's kind of like giving gifts - I don't bother remembering what I did for whom.
- edwardtay 9mo ago[flagged]
- Tade0 9mo agoThis is lovely, but in certain life circumstances I've found it more useful to have a to-dont-list, as in: list of things I would really like to do, but shouldn't because there are more pressing matters to attend to and I need to pace myself, otherwise things will turn ugly really quick. Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day. I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
- medstrom 9mo agoNot clear in your example if you have a to-dont list, or just decide "don't" in the moment.
- egonschiele 9mo agoThe list has helped me plan as its forced me to cut things, and just admit I won't have time to do them. For example, I took about fifty books off my shelf and to the little free library. They've been sitting there for years.
- dupdup 9mo agoPerson that has the ability to have post here in HN is enough of productive at least from most of us reading here. But for us, most of the time staring at the screen reading HN is also nice to keep a list here is what I do: I have a notebook on my desk that has horizontal lines(what is the word for it) I guess one line is .75 cm wide using that as a day of week I noted what I do that day with codes HackerNews hn, game, read, first job(fj), second job(sj), youtube you, bodybuilding bb, fut for thinking about future life. I keep the list over detail to show you how much a mundane life i have. But be sure more items make you more happy for that day. SO I mean please keep a list of what you are doing taht day
- fastasucan 9mo ago>Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day. The problem here is that they think it forces you to have an accomplishment. Just write what you did in short form. IT can be "Was very stressed and couldn't get anything substantial done, attended the monthly developer meeting and did some work on documentation". I do this as well to better remember what I have done at work, to quickly be able to document my value towards the company, and to have some "tabs" to show if there are any questions regarding what I did a day.
- egonschiele 9mo agoUnfortunately a pre-req would be me severely downgrading what I think is worth writing down as an accomplishment, or switching to writing down meaningless tasks (though that IS what the original tada list idea recommends)
- tambourine_man 9mo ago“learned took a CSS course” Extra word there
- gnarlouse 9mo agoWhat I want is: A todo list that feeds into a calendar (with a high degree of flexibility) that feeds into a tada list. I’ve been working on this casually for the better part of a year and hope to release something that is home-hostable later in 2026, once I’ve lived with it for a bit. Like I don’t want to remember that I need to do something, I just want a time slot in my calendar that auto populates against a set of constraints, so I can go from moment to moment in a flow. I want to be able to control that todo list and my goals’ time/space constraints with natural language—not some godforsaken form that gives you carpal tunnel. And then I want to see how my progress grows and how much I’m committing to what I want to do.
- niek_pas 9mo agoI did not know about value studies but I have to say, those are gorgeous works of art in and of themselves!
- Lalabadie 9mo agoFor similar reasons, I ended up sticking to a bullet journal (ish) format after I tried it ~10 years ago. I don't do long-term planning with it, but I have 1-2 weeks laid out in advance, and years of stuff logged. It keeps a record of things done and lived. In terms of planning and task keeping, the paper format also forces me to let things fall off the list if they won't get done after all. I also joke that I'll be the person who can actually answer if one day an investigator asks me "What were you doing on the night of November 22nd, 2019?"
- bawolff 9mo agoI like this idea. I often feel like im better at starting (or just planning) projects then seeing them through, so maybe doing this will force me to finish something.
- koliber 9mo agoI love the name. I’ve been doing this for a while. My name for it is super boring “todo archive” but I am renaming it next year. Keeping an archive of things I’ve done is great for my mental health. Occasionally, I even look search through it and the associated notes and fish out something useful.